How Your Church Can Reach More People And Grow With Simple 30 Second Invite Videos
Marketing/advertising on social media is a form of “Modern Day Evangelism!” Using the world’s best methods to amplify the world’s best message…the Gospel.
Imagine the Apostle Paul walked into (time traveler?) your most recent staff meeting and said, “Let’s get to work preaching the Gospel, making disciples, and planting churches. What’s the BEST and FASTEST way to communicate with the MOST people?”
What would you say?
If you didn’t say Facebook, IG, YouTube, TikTok, etc you’re not being honest.
Communication at the speed of light…and it isn’t hard…or even that expensive!
Marketing/advertising on these platforms is a form of “Modern Day Evangelism!” Using the world’s best methods to amplify the world’s best message…the Gospel.
Can Facebook ads communicate the Gospel?
Through my newsletter, I've helped over 2,000 churches learn something extremely valuable: The power of using paid Facebook/Instagram advertising as a tool for communicating the gospel.
With nothing more than simple 30 second invite videos you can make on your smartphone (yup, we’ve timed it!).
I know I know…when you hear the word “advertising” or “marketing” connected to church and outreach it’s a little rough…but stick with me.
In this post I'll explain WHY it works and then dive into HOW.
The Holy Spirit is at work in your community.
Before we understand the technical reality we need to understand the spiritual one.
First, the Holy Spirit is ALREADY at work in the hearts and minds of the people in your community.
But don’t take it from me…
The scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit convicts the world about sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment (that’s John 16:8 for the reference checkers). I call this the “Awareness” factor.
In plain Jane English, it means God’s already tap tap tapping on people’s hearts and minds saying, “Hey! How are you? Time to wake up!”
And I think that’s incredibly important to understand because it gives me BIG faith that someone in my city is ready to respond to an invite to church or coffee or whatever I invite them to…wait for it…
RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, I have the audacity to believe that real people are ready right now to go to church and respond to Jesus. If someone asks them to.
A relatively recent Lifeway study revealed that 8/10 people would go to church if someone they knew invited them. And about half of the people surveyed said they’d at least be open if a stranger invited them. Way higher than I expected.
This isn’t just theory. When we planted Joy Church back in 2016 we tested this idea. There were 20-30 people in my living room and then we met at various community centers that summer. For Father's Day we ran a simple little video for $20 on Facebook (price has gone up for sure since then!) and had 20 guests show up.
The first man we baptized in our church came from that ad. He gave his life to Jesus that Father’s Day.
Later that summer we were about 80 people total in the church and we moved into a local movie theater. We did a marketing campaign and had 156 people show up! People got saved and joined the church. We never dropped below 100 after that.
Then in October of that year we did another campaign and had over 200 people! And we kept on reaching people and growing. Fast forward to this last Easter and we had over 1500 people come to church. It works.
Are Facebook ads on par with personal evangelism?
Does marketing with social media replace personal evangelism, discipleship, and strong Bible teaching? No, of course not. Does it make you a better person or pastor? Nope. Does having more guests instantly fix your back-door issues? Sorry, no.
But there’s something powerful about investing in reaching new people. When you care about what God cares about, He blesses it!
A common misconception is that using advertising/marketing isn't trusting God. It's actually the exact opposite. Because I believe God is at work drawing people by His Spirit I am more confident they'll respond to the message!
Like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3, "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow."
When we use simple invite videos like I teach in my coaching program and broadcast them out to hundreds and thousands of people we're planting seeds! When we use the powerful retargeting features that Facebook provides we continue to water those seeds. And God uses the foolishness (simple little invite videos) to touch people's lives!
It reminds me of what D.L. Moody once said about evangelism:
“It is clear you don’t like my way of doing evangelism. You raise some good points. Frankly, I sometimes do not like my way of doing evangelism. But I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.”-D.L. Moody to a critic
Oh snap.
The power of consistency.
The second big idea is that consistency leads to transformation.
As a pastor I've preached for years about the power of daily Bible reading and prayer. As I'm sure you have too!
We know that daily spiritual disciplines lead to transformation. It works exactly the same when it comes to marketing. When people see and hear your message again and again via Facebook ads...eventually it sticks.
There's a moment when someone goes, "Huh...I think I'll go check it out..." Or perhaps a crisis or life event occurs and now what they've been seeing again and again bubbles up to the top of their mind. And if you've been consistently there on their social media feed they'll turn to you, to your church, and to Jesus.
It's actually pretty simple. My strategy isn't fancy. It's common sense.
Just keep inviting, loving, and sharing Jesus with as many people as possible for as long as possible.
Using the world's best methods to proclaim the world's best message. That's a big part of what I teach in UpLevel Leader, my coaching group for pastors and church leaders. How to master these tools so you can make a BIG impact in your community.
What’s cool about using digital marketing tools like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more is that it doesn’t replace your other evangelism and outreach strategies. It amplifies them!
I can’t tell you how many times someone says to me, “Oh yeah, we came from your ad on Facebook and we also know so and so down the street who invited us last Christmas, etc.” Our goal is simply to make it impossible for people to ignore that “tap tap tap of the Holy Spirit” in their heart.
At this point we have some variation of a simple 30 second invite ad running 24/7/365. Yeah seriously. And even after YEARS of that we still have first time guests Every. Single. Sunday. And I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not because of me! It’s because of the consistent drip drip drip of reminding, inviting and trusting that God is working on people’s hearts all the time!
How do Facebook ads for church actually work?
When I sat down a few years ago to create my course the Facebook Invitation System I thought about my dad. He’s since retired from pastoring (40 years strong!) but at the time was the classic Baby Boomer pastor. Not a technological dinosaur by any means but also not a digital native when it came to navigating Facebook. I knew whatever I taught had to work for him and any other pastor out there in the trenches.
So I made it as “paint by numbers” simple as I possibly could.
I call it The Facebook Invitation System and I put everything in a step by step video course right here. But I’ll share the nuts and bolts with you now!
First, the 30 second ad.
I call it a “This Sunday” or just “Simple Sunday” ad. Here’s how it works. I pull out my phone or have someone take a video of me (the lead pastor) inviting people to church in 30 seconds or less. Why 30 seconds? Because of attention spans, dude! “Oh look, a squirrel!…Did I pay the water bill? What year is it?”
People aren’t giving you 5 mins unless you’re really good. And I’m not. So I keep it short n’ sweet. And you should too. For another good reason…
30 seconds is also the standard runtime for a TV ad and we use the same 30 second invite video for TV, Radio, YouTube, and other places. Don’t worry too much about that right now but file it away. That 30 second length is standard.
When it comes to the ad the goal is to be personable and real. Let your personality come through (unless you have a bad personality…haha).
I just smile and say, “Hey, it’s Jake from Joy Church and I want to invite you to come to church this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. We meet at (address here) You can get all the info at (website here). Every week at Joy Church we have a relevant message from the Bible, a great environment for kids, and free coffee and donuts. We’d love to see you there this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. Check out (website here) for more.”
That’s the gist of the basic ad. Probably 80% of our marketing is that script or something nearly identical. Every once in a while I’ll riff in some extra lines.
One key thing is that you front-load the ad with the most important information. What do you want them to do? - come to church. When? - service times. Where? - location. How to get more info? - website. That all happens in the first 5-10 seconds.
Then we take that 30 second video and post it as a traffic ad on Facebook (which can also go on Instagram). We geo-target 10-20 miles around our building. Done.
One rule of thumb on the budget is to spend $100/day per 100,000 people targeted at an absolute MAXIMUM. Seriously, you can overspend and it hurts your ad campaign. We usually do a lot less than that. Maybe $25/day per 100,000 people.
Here’s the result of this simple ad campaign. You’re now “hitting the virtual streets” inviting people to church all over town! Now just pray that God uses it to bring lost and hurting people through your doors. And get ready to disciple them!
Learn more about growing your church!
If you want to go deeper with me and my team of coaches I’d love to see you in UpLevel Leader. Marketing and outreach are just the tip of the iceberg of what we teach. It's a great community of pastors and leaders encouraging each other and growing together. Our mission is simple: Grow the leader. Grow the Church.
We do a weekly live ZOOM call (been doing it before it was popular, haha) with top leaders from around the world and it's highly educational, encouraging, and challenging.
Plus, an entire library of courses on how to grow your church numerically and spiritually, how to make disciples, build culture and teams, effective followup, and more!
In my admittedly biased opinion you have to work pretty hard not to grow personally and see your church grow numerically when you're a part of UpLevel Leader!
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Jake is a church planter and pastor with a heart to help churches grow through creative outreach and discipleship. He's had the privilege of coaching over 500 pastors around the world through UpLevel Leader. Jake and his wife Bethany also pastor Joy Church in Eugene, OR but their main job is raising three rambunctious kids: Evelyn, Jack, and Penny.
Imagine the Apostle Paul walked into (time traveler?) your most recent staff meeting and said, “Let’s get to work preaching the Gospel, making disciples, and planting churches. What’s the BEST and FASTEST way to communicate with the MOST people?”
What would you say?
If you didn’t say Facebook, IG, YouTube, TikTok, etc you’re not being honest.
Communication at the speed of light…and it isn’t hard…or even that expensive!
Marketing/advertising on these platforms is a form of “Modern Day Evangelism!” Using the world’s best methods to amplify the world’s best message…the Gospel.
Can Facebook ads communicate the Gospel?
Through my newsletter, I've helped over 2,000 churches learn something extremely valuable: The power of using paid Facebook/Instagram advertising as a tool for communicating the gospel.
With nothing more than simple 30 second invite videos you can make on your smartphone (yup, we’ve timed it!).
I know I know…when you hear the word “advertising” or “marketing” connected to church and outreach it’s a little rough…but stick with me.
In this post I'll explain WHY it works and then dive into HOW.
The Holy Spirit is at work in your community.
Before we understand the technical reality we need to understand the spiritual one.
First, the Holy Spirit is ALREADY at work in the hearts and minds of the people in your community.
But don’t take it from me…
The scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit convicts the world about sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment (that’s John 16:8 for the reference checkers). I call this the “Awareness” factor.
In plain Jane English, it means God’s already tap tap tapping on people’s hearts and minds saying, “Hey! How are you? Time to wake up!”
And I think that’s incredibly important to understand because it gives me BIG faith that someone in my city is ready to respond to an invite to church or coffee or whatever I invite them to…wait for it…
RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, I have the audacity to believe that real people are ready right now to go to church and respond to Jesus. If someone asks them to.
A relatively recent Lifeway study revealed that 8/10 people would go to church if someone they knew invited them. And about half of the people surveyed said they’d at least be open if a stranger invited them. Way higher than I expected.
This isn’t just theory. When we planted Joy Church back in 2016 we tested this idea. There were 20-30 people in my living room and then we met at various community centers that summer. For Father's Day we ran a simple little video for $20 on Facebook (price has gone up for sure since then!) and had 20 guests show up.
The first man we baptized in our church came from that ad. He gave his life to Jesus that Father’s Day.
Later that summer we were about 80 people total in the church and we moved into a local movie theater. We did a marketing campaign and had 156 people show up! People got saved and joined the church. We never dropped below 100 after that.
Then in October of that year we did another campaign and had over 200 people! And we kept on reaching people and growing. Fast forward to this last Easter and we had over 1500 people come to church. It works.
Are Facebook ads on par with personal evangelism?
Does marketing with social media replace personal evangelism, discipleship, and strong Bible teaching? No, of course not. Does it make you a better person or pastor? Nope. Does having more guests instantly fix your back-door issues? Sorry, no.
But there’s something powerful about investing in reaching new people. When you care about what God cares about, He blesses it!
A common misconception is that using advertising/marketing isn't trusting God. It's actually the exact opposite. Because I believe God is at work drawing people by His Spirit I am more confident they'll respond to the message!
Like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3, "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow."
When we use simple invite videos like I teach in my coaching program and broadcast them out to hundreds and thousands of people we're planting seeds! When we use the powerful retargeting features that Facebook provides we continue to water those seeds. And God uses the foolishness (simple little invite videos) to touch people's lives!
It reminds me of what D.L. Moody once said about evangelism:
“It is clear you don’t like my way of doing evangelism. You raise some good points. Frankly, I sometimes do not like my way of doing evangelism. But I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.”-D.L. Moody to a critic
Oh snap.
The power of consistency.
The second big idea is that consistency leads to transformation.
As a pastor I've preached for years about the power of daily Bible reading and prayer. As I'm sure you have too!
We know that daily spiritual disciplines lead to transformation. It works exactly the same when it comes to marketing. When people see and hear your message again and again via Facebook ads...eventually it sticks.
There's a moment when someone goes, "Huh...I think I'll go check it out..." Or perhaps a crisis or life event occurs and now what they've been seeing again and again bubbles up to the top of their mind. And if you've been consistently there on their social media feed they'll turn to you, to your church, and to Jesus.
It's actually pretty simple. My strategy isn't fancy. It's common sense.
Just keep inviting, loving, and sharing Jesus with as many people as possible for as long as possible.
Using the world's best methods to proclaim the world's best message. That's a big part of what I teach in UpLevel Leader, my coaching group for pastors and church leaders. How to master these tools so you can make a BIG impact in your community.
What’s cool about using digital marketing tools like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more is that it doesn’t replace your other evangelism and outreach strategies. It amplifies them!
I can’t tell you how many times someone says to me, “Oh yeah, we came from your ad on Facebook and we also know so and so down the street who invited us last Christmas, etc.” Our goal is simply to make it impossible for people to ignore that “tap tap tap of the Holy Spirit” in their heart.
At this point we have some variation of a simple 30 second invite ad running 24/7/365. Yeah seriously. And even after YEARS of that we still have first time guests Every. Single. Sunday. And I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not because of me! It’s because of the consistent drip drip drip of reminding, inviting and trusting that God is working on people’s hearts all the time!
How do Facebook ads for church actually work?
When I sat down a few years ago to create my course the Facebook Invitation System I thought about my dad. He’s since retired from pastoring (40 years strong!) but at the time was the classic Baby Boomer pastor. Not a technological dinosaur by any means but also not a digital native when it came to navigating Facebook. I knew whatever I taught had to work for him and any other pastor out there in the trenches.
So I made it as “paint by numbers” simple as I possibly could.
I call it The Facebook Invitation System and I put everything in a step by step video course right here. But I’ll share the nuts and bolts with you now!
First, the 30 second ad.
I call it a “This Sunday” or just “Simple Sunday” ad. Here’s how it works. I pull out my phone or have someone take a video of me (the lead pastor) inviting people to church in 30 seconds or less. Why 30 seconds? Because of attention spans, dude! “Oh look, a squirrel!…Did I pay the water bill? What year is it?”
People aren’t giving you 5 mins unless you’re really good. And I’m not. So I keep it short n’ sweet. And you should too. For another good reason…
30 seconds is also the standard runtime for a TV ad and we use the same 30 second invite video for TV, Radio, YouTube, and other places. Don’t worry too much about that right now but file it away. That 30 second length is standard.
When it comes to the ad the goal is to be personable and real. Let your personality come through (unless you have a bad personality…haha).
I just smile and say, “Hey, it’s Jake from Joy Church and I want to invite you to come to church this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. We meet at (address here) You can get all the info at (website here). Every week at Joy Church we have a relevant message from the Bible, a great environment for kids, and free coffee and donuts. We’d love to see you there this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. Check out (website here) for more.”
That’s the gist of the basic ad. Probably 80% of our marketing is that script or something nearly identical. Every once in a while I’ll riff in some extra lines.
One key thing is that you front-load the ad with the most important information. What do you want them to do? - come to church. When? - service times. Where? - location. How to get more info? - website. That all happens in the first 5-10 seconds.
Then we take that 30 second video and post it as a traffic ad on Facebook (which can also go on Instagram). We geo-target 10-20 miles around our building. Done.
One rule of thumb on the budget is to spend $100/day per 100,000 people targeted at an absolute MAXIMUM. Seriously, you can overspend and it hurts your ad campaign. We usually do a lot less than that. Maybe $25/day per 100,000 people.
Here’s the result of this simple ad campaign. You’re now “hitting the virtual streets” inviting people to church all over town! Now just pray that God uses it to bring lost and hurting people through your doors. And get ready to disciple them!
Learn more about growing your church!
If you want to go deeper with me and my team of coaches I’d love to see you in UpLevel Leader. Marketing and outreach are just the tip of the iceberg of what we teach. It's a great community of pastors and leaders encouraging each other and growing together. Our mission is simple: Grow the leader. Grow the Church.
We do a weekly live ZOOM call (been doing it before it was popular, haha) with top leaders from around the world and it's highly educational, encouraging, and challenging.
Plus, an entire library of courses on how to grow your church numerically and spiritually, how to make disciples, build culture and teams, effective followup, and more!
In my admittedly biased opinion you have to work pretty hard not to grow personally and see your church grow numerically when you're a part of UpLevel Leader!
podcast transcript
Jake is a church planter and pastor with a heart to help churches grow through creative outreach and discipleship. He's had the privilege of coaching over 500 pastors around the world through UpLevel Leader. Jake and his wife Bethany also pastor Joy Church in Eugene, OR but their main job is raising three rambunctious kids: Evelyn, Jack, and Penny.
Imagine the Apostle Paul walked into (time traveler?) your most recent staff meeting and said, “Let’s get to work preaching the Gospel, making disciples, and planting churches. What’s the BEST and FASTEST way to communicate with the MOST people?”
What would you say?
If you didn’t say Facebook, IG, YouTube, TikTok, etc you’re not being honest.
Communication at the speed of light…and it isn’t hard…or even that expensive!
Marketing/advertising on these platforms is a form of “Modern Day Evangelism!” Using the world’s best methods to amplify the world’s best message…the Gospel.
Can Facebook ads communicate the Gospel?
Through my newsletter, I've helped over 2,000 churches learn something extremely valuable: The power of using paid Facebook/Instagram advertising as a tool for communicating the gospel.
With nothing more than simple 30 second invite videos you can make on your smartphone (yup, we’ve timed it!).
I know I know…when you hear the word “advertising” or “marketing” connected to church and outreach it’s a little rough…but stick with me.
In this post I'll explain WHY it works and then dive into HOW.
The Holy Spirit is at work in your community.
Before we understand the technical reality we need to understand the spiritual one.
First, the Holy Spirit is ALREADY at work in the hearts and minds of the people in your community.
But don’t take it from me…
The scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit convicts the world about sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment (that’s John 16:8 for the reference checkers). I call this the “Awareness” factor.
In plain Jane English, it means God’s already tap tap tapping on people’s hearts and minds saying, “Hey! How are you? Time to wake up!”
And I think that’s incredibly important to understand because it gives me BIG faith that someone in my city is ready to respond to an invite to church or coffee or whatever I invite them to…wait for it…
RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, I have the audacity to believe that real people are ready right now to go to church and respond to Jesus. If someone asks them to.
A relatively recent Lifeway study revealed that 8/10 people would go to church if someone they knew invited them. And about half of the people surveyed said they’d at least be open if a stranger invited them. Way higher than I expected.
This isn’t just theory. When we planted Joy Church back in 2016 we tested this idea. There were 20-30 people in my living room and then we met at various community centers that summer. For Father's Day we ran a simple little video for $20 on Facebook (price has gone up for sure since then!) and had 20 guests show up.
The first man we baptized in our church came from that ad. He gave his life to Jesus that Father’s Day.
Later that summer we were about 80 people total in the church and we moved into a local movie theater. We did a marketing campaign and had 156 people show up! People got saved and joined the church. We never dropped below 100 after that.
Then in October of that year we did another campaign and had over 200 people! And we kept on reaching people and growing. Fast forward to this last Easter and we had over 1500 people come to church. It works.
Are Facebook ads on par with personal evangelism?
Does marketing with social media replace personal evangelism, discipleship, and strong Bible teaching? No, of course not. Does it make you a better person or pastor? Nope. Does having more guests instantly fix your back-door issues? Sorry, no.
But there’s something powerful about investing in reaching new people. When you care about what God cares about, He blesses it!
A common misconception is that using advertising/marketing isn't trusting God. It's actually the exact opposite. Because I believe God is at work drawing people by His Spirit I am more confident they'll respond to the message!
Like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3, "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow."
When we use simple invite videos like I teach in my coaching program and broadcast them out to hundreds and thousands of people we're planting seeds! When we use the powerful retargeting features that Facebook provides we continue to water those seeds. And God uses the foolishness (simple little invite videos) to touch people's lives!
It reminds me of what D.L. Moody once said about evangelism:
“It is clear you don’t like my way of doing evangelism. You raise some good points. Frankly, I sometimes do not like my way of doing evangelism. But I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.”-D.L. Moody to a critic
Oh snap.
The power of consistency.
The second big idea is that consistency leads to transformation.
As a pastor I've preached for years about the power of daily Bible reading and prayer. As I'm sure you have too!
We know that daily spiritual disciplines lead to transformation. It works exactly the same when it comes to marketing. When people see and hear your message again and again via Facebook ads...eventually it sticks.
There's a moment when someone goes, "Huh...I think I'll go check it out..." Or perhaps a crisis or life event occurs and now what they've been seeing again and again bubbles up to the top of their mind. And if you've been consistently there on their social media feed they'll turn to you, to your church, and to Jesus.
It's actually pretty simple. My strategy isn't fancy. It's common sense.
Just keep inviting, loving, and sharing Jesus with as many people as possible for as long as possible.
Using the world's best methods to proclaim the world's best message. That's a big part of what I teach in UpLevel Leader, my coaching group for pastors and church leaders. How to master these tools so you can make a BIG impact in your community.
What’s cool about using digital marketing tools like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more is that it doesn’t replace your other evangelism and outreach strategies. It amplifies them!
I can’t tell you how many times someone says to me, “Oh yeah, we came from your ad on Facebook and we also know so and so down the street who invited us last Christmas, etc.” Our goal is simply to make it impossible for people to ignore that “tap tap tap of the Holy Spirit” in their heart.
At this point we have some variation of a simple 30 second invite ad running 24/7/365. Yeah seriously. And even after YEARS of that we still have first time guests Every. Single. Sunday. And I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not because of me! It’s because of the consistent drip drip drip of reminding, inviting and trusting that God is working on people’s hearts all the time!
How do Facebook ads for church actually work?
When I sat down a few years ago to create my course the Facebook Invitation System I thought about my dad. He’s since retired from pastoring (40 years strong!) but at the time was the classic Baby Boomer pastor. Not a technological dinosaur by any means but also not a digital native when it came to navigating Facebook. I knew whatever I taught had to work for him and any other pastor out there in the trenches.
So I made it as “paint by numbers” simple as I possibly could.
I call it The Facebook Invitation System and I put everything in a step by step video course right here. But I’ll share the nuts and bolts with you now!
First, the 30 second ad.
I call it a “This Sunday” or just “Simple Sunday” ad. Here’s how it works. I pull out my phone or have someone take a video of me (the lead pastor) inviting people to church in 30 seconds or less. Why 30 seconds? Because of attention spans, dude! “Oh look, a squirrel!…Did I pay the water bill? What year is it?”
People aren’t giving you 5 mins unless you’re really good. And I’m not. So I keep it short n’ sweet. And you should too. For another good reason…
30 seconds is also the standard runtime for a TV ad and we use the same 30 second invite video for TV, Radio, YouTube, and other places. Don’t worry too much about that right now but file it away. That 30 second length is standard.
When it comes to the ad the goal is to be personable and real. Let your personality come through (unless you have a bad personality…haha).
I just smile and say, “Hey, it’s Jake from Joy Church and I want to invite you to come to church this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. We meet at (address here) You can get all the info at (website here). Every week at Joy Church we have a relevant message from the Bible, a great environment for kids, and free coffee and donuts. We’d love to see you there this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. Check out (website here) for more.”
That’s the gist of the basic ad. Probably 80% of our marketing is that script or something nearly identical. Every once in a while I’ll riff in some extra lines.
One key thing is that you front-load the ad with the most important information. What do you want them to do? - come to church. When? - service times. Where? - location. How to get more info? - website. That all happens in the first 5-10 seconds.
Then we take that 30 second video and post it as a traffic ad on Facebook (which can also go on Instagram). We geo-target 10-20 miles around our building. Done.
One rule of thumb on the budget is to spend $100/day per 100,000 people targeted at an absolute MAXIMUM. Seriously, you can overspend and it hurts your ad campaign. We usually do a lot less than that. Maybe $25/day per 100,000 people.
Here’s the result of this simple ad campaign. You’re now “hitting the virtual streets” inviting people to church all over town! Now just pray that God uses it to bring lost and hurting people through your doors. And get ready to disciple them!
Learn more about growing your church!
If you want to go deeper with me and my team of coaches I’d love to see you in UpLevel Leader. Marketing and outreach are just the tip of the iceberg of what we teach. It's a great community of pastors and leaders encouraging each other and growing together. Our mission is simple: Grow the leader. Grow the Church.
We do a weekly live ZOOM call (been doing it before it was popular, haha) with top leaders from around the world and it's highly educational, encouraging, and challenging.
Plus, an entire library of courses on how to grow your church numerically and spiritually, how to make disciples, build culture and teams, effective followup, and more!
In my admittedly biased opinion you have to work pretty hard not to grow personally and see your church grow numerically when you're a part of UpLevel Leader!
VIDEO transcript
Imagine the Apostle Paul walked into (time traveler?) your most recent staff meeting and said, “Let’s get to work preaching the Gospel, making disciples, and planting churches. What’s the BEST and FASTEST way to communicate with the MOST people?”
What would you say?
If you didn’t say Facebook, IG, YouTube, TikTok, etc you’re not being honest.
Communication at the speed of light…and it isn’t hard…or even that expensive!
Marketing/advertising on these platforms is a form of “Modern Day Evangelism!” Using the world’s best methods to amplify the world’s best message…the Gospel.
Can Facebook ads communicate the Gospel?
Through my newsletter, I've helped over 2,000 churches learn something extremely valuable: The power of using paid Facebook/Instagram advertising as a tool for communicating the gospel.
With nothing more than simple 30 second invite videos you can make on your smartphone (yup, we’ve timed it!).
I know I know…when you hear the word “advertising” or “marketing” connected to church and outreach it’s a little rough…but stick with me.
In this post I'll explain WHY it works and then dive into HOW.
The Holy Spirit is at work in your community.
Before we understand the technical reality we need to understand the spiritual one.
First, the Holy Spirit is ALREADY at work in the hearts and minds of the people in your community.
But don’t take it from me…
The scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit convicts the world about sin, righteousness, and the coming judgment (that’s John 16:8 for the reference checkers). I call this the “Awareness” factor.
In plain Jane English, it means God’s already tap tap tapping on people’s hearts and minds saying, “Hey! How are you? Time to wake up!”
And I think that’s incredibly important to understand because it gives me BIG faith that someone in my city is ready to respond to an invite to church or coffee or whatever I invite them to…wait for it…
RIGHT NOW.
Yeah, I have the audacity to believe that real people are ready right now to go to church and respond to Jesus. If someone asks them to.
A relatively recent Lifeway study revealed that 8/10 people would go to church if someone they knew invited them. And about half of the people surveyed said they’d at least be open if a stranger invited them. Way higher than I expected.
This isn’t just theory. When we planted Joy Church back in 2016 we tested this idea. There were 20-30 people in my living room and then we met at various community centers that summer. For Father's Day we ran a simple little video for $20 on Facebook (price has gone up for sure since then!) and had 20 guests show up.
The first man we baptized in our church came from that ad. He gave his life to Jesus that Father’s Day.
Later that summer we were about 80 people total in the church and we moved into a local movie theater. We did a marketing campaign and had 156 people show up! People got saved and joined the church. We never dropped below 100 after that.
Then in October of that year we did another campaign and had over 200 people! And we kept on reaching people and growing. Fast forward to this last Easter and we had over 1500 people come to church. It works.
Are Facebook ads on par with personal evangelism?
Does marketing with social media replace personal evangelism, discipleship, and strong Bible teaching? No, of course not. Does it make you a better person or pastor? Nope. Does having more guests instantly fix your back-door issues? Sorry, no.
But there’s something powerful about investing in reaching new people. When you care about what God cares about, He blesses it!
A common misconception is that using advertising/marketing isn't trusting God. It's actually the exact opposite. Because I believe God is at work drawing people by His Spirit I am more confident they'll respond to the message!
Like Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3, "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow."
When we use simple invite videos like I teach in my coaching program and broadcast them out to hundreds and thousands of people we're planting seeds! When we use the powerful retargeting features that Facebook provides we continue to water those seeds. And God uses the foolishness (simple little invite videos) to touch people's lives!
It reminds me of what D.L. Moody once said about evangelism:
“It is clear you don’t like my way of doing evangelism. You raise some good points. Frankly, I sometimes do not like my way of doing evangelism. But I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.”-D.L. Moody to a critic
Oh snap.
The power of consistency.
The second big idea is that consistency leads to transformation.
As a pastor I've preached for years about the power of daily Bible reading and prayer. As I'm sure you have too!
We know that daily spiritual disciplines lead to transformation. It works exactly the same when it comes to marketing. When people see and hear your message again and again via Facebook ads...eventually it sticks.
There's a moment when someone goes, "Huh...I think I'll go check it out..." Or perhaps a crisis or life event occurs and now what they've been seeing again and again bubbles up to the top of their mind. And if you've been consistently there on their social media feed they'll turn to you, to your church, and to Jesus.
It's actually pretty simple. My strategy isn't fancy. It's common sense.
Just keep inviting, loving, and sharing Jesus with as many people as possible for as long as possible.
Using the world's best methods to proclaim the world's best message. That's a big part of what I teach in UpLevel Leader, my coaching group for pastors and church leaders. How to master these tools so you can make a BIG impact in your community.
What’s cool about using digital marketing tools like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and more is that it doesn’t replace your other evangelism and outreach strategies. It amplifies them!
I can’t tell you how many times someone says to me, “Oh yeah, we came from your ad on Facebook and we also know so and so down the street who invited us last Christmas, etc.” Our goal is simply to make it impossible for people to ignore that “tap tap tap of the Holy Spirit” in their heart.
At this point we have some variation of a simple 30 second invite ad running 24/7/365. Yeah seriously. And even after YEARS of that we still have first time guests Every. Single. Sunday. And I’ll be the first to tell you it’s not because of me! It’s because of the consistent drip drip drip of reminding, inviting and trusting that God is working on people’s hearts all the time!
How do Facebook ads for church actually work?
When I sat down a few years ago to create my course the Facebook Invitation System I thought about my dad. He’s since retired from pastoring (40 years strong!) but at the time was the classic Baby Boomer pastor. Not a technological dinosaur by any means but also not a digital native when it came to navigating Facebook. I knew whatever I taught had to work for him and any other pastor out there in the trenches.
So I made it as “paint by numbers” simple as I possibly could.
I call it The Facebook Invitation System and I put everything in a step by step video course right here. But I’ll share the nuts and bolts with you now!
First, the 30 second ad.
I call it a “This Sunday” or just “Simple Sunday” ad. Here’s how it works. I pull out my phone or have someone take a video of me (the lead pastor) inviting people to church in 30 seconds or less. Why 30 seconds? Because of attention spans, dude! “Oh look, a squirrel!…Did I pay the water bill? What year is it?”
People aren’t giving you 5 mins unless you’re really good. And I’m not. So I keep it short n’ sweet. And you should too. For another good reason…
30 seconds is also the standard runtime for a TV ad and we use the same 30 second invite video for TV, Radio, YouTube, and other places. Don’t worry too much about that right now but file it away. That 30 second length is standard.
When it comes to the ad the goal is to be personable and real. Let your personality come through (unless you have a bad personality…haha).
I just smile and say, “Hey, it’s Jake from Joy Church and I want to invite you to come to church this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. We meet at (address here) You can get all the info at (website here). Every week at Joy Church we have a relevant message from the Bible, a great environment for kids, and free coffee and donuts. We’d love to see you there this Sunday at 9 or 11 am. Check out (website here) for more.”
That’s the gist of the basic ad. Probably 80% of our marketing is that script or something nearly identical. Every once in a while I’ll riff in some extra lines.
One key thing is that you front-load the ad with the most important information. What do you want them to do? - come to church. When? - service times. Where? - location. How to get more info? - website. That all happens in the first 5-10 seconds.
Then we take that 30 second video and post it as a traffic ad on Facebook (which can also go on Instagram). We geo-target 10-20 miles around our building. Done.
One rule of thumb on the budget is to spend $100/day per 100,000 people targeted at an absolute MAXIMUM. Seriously, you can overspend and it hurts your ad campaign. We usually do a lot less than that. Maybe $25/day per 100,000 people.
Here’s the result of this simple ad campaign. You’re now “hitting the virtual streets” inviting people to church all over town! Now just pray that God uses it to bring lost and hurting people through your doors. And get ready to disciple them!
Learn more about growing your church!
If you want to go deeper with me and my team of coaches I’d love to see you in UpLevel Leader. Marketing and outreach are just the tip of the iceberg of what we teach. It's a great community of pastors and leaders encouraging each other and growing together. Our mission is simple: Grow the leader. Grow the Church.
We do a weekly live ZOOM call (been doing it before it was popular, haha) with top leaders from around the world and it's highly educational, encouraging, and challenging.
Plus, an entire library of courses on how to grow your church numerically and spiritually, how to make disciples, build culture and teams, effective followup, and more!
In my admittedly biased opinion you have to work pretty hard not to grow personally and see your church grow numerically when you're a part of UpLevel Leader!
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Jake is a church planter and pastor with a heart to help churches grow through creative outreach and discipleship. He's had the privilege of coaching over 500 pastors around the world through UpLevel Leader. Jake and his wife Bethany also pastor Joy Church in Eugene, OR but their main job is raising three rambunctious kids: Evelyn, Jack, and Penny.
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